I'm now a Vi user

Vi Gang SignI've used my fair share of text editors including Emacs for 2 years and Eclipse several years.
My favorite open source program has always been Scite, and I still have it on my launch panel. But now I'm a vi man.
I tried to go back to Emacs, but it takes so long to get used to and there are too many funny keystrokes. Emacs users tend to get an Emacs Pinky from using the Ctrl key so much, which was not a problem I was looking forward to. Emacs also seems to have too many choices, too many cool downloads to get, each of which slows down the startup time.
I liked Scite because the keyboard was setup similar to Visual Studviio, which I had used for years. It is also a solid program that is very customizable. Also, being open source is great, I even contributed some code to the project.
But after reading this article I decided to give vim another try. What got me interested again was the suggestion to always be in 'normal' mode and to be in insert mode only for short bursts.
And then I tried gvim, i.e. the graphic version of vim. What a joy to use. Cut and paste actually works! Even selecting and middle clicking for paste works correctly. Being able to edit, move around without taking your hands off the home row is wonderful, especially when you are on a laptop, which always seems to place the keys in funny locations.
When did they add visual mode? It's great, I type V, j, j, j, > and it indents three lines. The other trick I really like is press c, t, and ', say and quickly replace everything up until the the ' (quote). A feature I also like is pressing Ctrl-P or Ctrl-N (in insert mode) to complete the text I'm on using the closest match (previous or next in the text). If you haven't tried vi in a few years and touch type, I'd give vim another shot. It's has really aged well and all

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi Scott!

I welcome you back to the vi fold! I have been using vim for quite some time now. I even have a vim plugin for my intellij!

I was looking around your blog and I see that your Victor is big now! I have a new daughter myself! Amélie was born on October 20, 2006. Needless to say that is keeping me busy.

The business news up here is that we are now Open Text!

TTYL

Glenn Buckholtz
former Pablo Developer :-)
Scott Kirkwood said…
Thanks for leaving the comment Glenn. Congratulations on the daughter.
I already feel like a VI guru. Just today I say someone commenting out a bunch of lines and I said, don't you know you can just go in Visual Block mode and insert for all the lines?

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